Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

Then she went down to the kitchen. Her husband had left her some ungarnished leaves of lettuce, a tomato, some crisps and a slice of cheese. Coldly she scraped it all into the waste bucket. Then she turned on a tap and, for several minutes held the plate beneath it, letting the warm water run over her hands. After a while, the professor emerged from the living room a second time and asked if he could do anything to help. He was trying his best to find out what was troubling her, while simultaneously hoping to keep her just calm enough that he wouldn’t have to find out at all.

‘No,’ she said flatly.

This frightened him so much that he retreated, not back to the living room this time, where she might possibly follow, but to his study, where she never came, ‘to finish off some work,’ as he said.

She sat down in front of the TV for a while, but she found that, just at the moment when her mind was beginning to grasp hold of an image and make some vague sort of sense of it, it was snatched away from her again and replaced with another. All she could think about was the pressure growing within her, and the dark lake outside.

‘Pull yourself together!’ she told herself firmly, knowing all too well where all this was leading. ‘We can’t always have what we want. And we can’t just give way to our own impulses.’

She’d said this often enough, after all, to all those feathery ne’er-do-wells around the lake who came to her with sorry tales of their foolish, bungled lives: ‘It’s no good thinking we can put things right for ourselves by taking from others what isn’t ours. That just makes life harder for everyone.’

And as they stood there dripping into muddy puddles, they would hang their beaks in shame, their caps pressed respectfully against their chests.

‘We can’t just give way to our impulses,’ the professor’s wife repeated to herself firmly as she lay in her bed, waiting for her husband to finish reading.

Even at four years old she had expostulated with the foolish children who spoiled things for themselves by splashing paint all over their colouring books, and not even trying to keep between the lines.

‘It’s more fun if you do things properly,’ she’d told them.

All they’d be left with, after all, when they’d finished messing about, was a shapeless brown mess, and why bother with a colouring book at all if that was what you wanted? But they wouldn’t listen. They just laughed at her, and carried on shouting and fooling about while she sat all by herself across the room, carefully applying the colours in their proper places, and taking great care not to cross the lines.

But, for all that, as soon as her husband had turned off his light, kissed her on the cheek, and settled into a steady rhythm of snores, the professor’s wife jumped up and crept in her nightdress down to the kitchen. The fridge hummed in the warm darkness. The clock ticked on the wall. A red standby light, like a tiny glowing fire, dimly illuminated a wooden block of knives that happened to stand beside it. Her hands were shaking with excitement as she slid back the bolts on the back door and turned the key. And then there it was in front of her, with no curtains to hide it: the great black night.

‘Out you go then, trouble,’ she whispered to her shadow.

And she heard its throaty chuckle as it skipped off down to the lake in its little black dress and heels.

It would bring trouble, there could be no doubt about that, but it was still an enormous relief to let it go. Feeling almost weightless, she returned to bed, climbed in beside her still-snoring husband and sank into sleep at once.

But an hour later she was awake again.

Sounds came from the lake through the open window: croakings and patterings, plashes and reedy sighs. And behind those sounds, others, so faint as to be hardly sounds at all. Moans of pleasure, they seemed to be, or gasps, or muffled laughter.

For a long time, she lay there listening to the life beyond the walls of the house, and fighting the temptation to peer out. But finally a sudden loud splash was too much for her and she rushed to the window with a pounding heart, convinced that she would see her reckless shadow doing some awful thing like diving naked from the wooden jetty, with the whole lakeside watching, and maybe the gander in his waistcoat and his trilby hat, shouting out ribald encouragement. After all, didn’t her shadow long more than anything else to feel the world against its naked skin?

But no, the jetty was empty and the water around it calm. The clouds had cleared and the lake was so smooth that it seemed not so much a body of water as a silver membrane, gossamer-thin, stretched out between two great hemispheres of stars.

‘Are you alright there, darling?’ her husband murmured as she returned to bed.

She didn’t answer him. In fact, she hardly noticed him speak. She just lay down again and carried on listening to the night outside.

After another hour of wakefulness she jumped up again, having this time managed to convince herself that she could hear the creak and slosh of a rowing boat out on the lake, and the careless shadow singing and joking in the bow, stripped naked to the waist, while its admiring companions – the fox perhaps, and the hare with his foppish beret – laughed and cheered as they pulled together at the oars.

But there was no boat, no shadow, no fox or hare, only a single swan drifting sleepily under the moon. Paired with its perfect reflection in the still water, it resembled a scorpion, a giant scorpion of the stars crossing some vast and empty tract of space.

‘Come back. Come back to me,’ the professor’s wife whispered as she returned to her tangled bed.

‘Come back?’ muttered her husband, half-waking once again. ‘Is that what you said, darling? But I’m already here, my dear! I’m right here beside you!’

And he sank straight back into sleep.

Every time so far, she reminded herself as she lay there in the darkness, her shadow had come home before sunrise. Its face might be bruised and swollen, its black dress drenched, its feet bare and muddy, but each time it had returned, to be met by her at the back door with anxious, whispered reproaches.

‘What took you so long? Can’t you see it’s nearly dawn?’

She’d hurry it into the kitchen and, after one last furtive peep outside to check that no one had been watching, she would shut the door, bolt it, bolt it again, turn the key in the lock, and begin to ready herself for daylight.

But she knew, she already knew, that the morning would one day come when the sun would rise before her shadow had returned. It could be today, it could be tomorrow, it might not be for another month, but on that day, instead of a secret tapping at the back door in the dark, there would be a loud knock at the front door in full daylight, and then a strident ringing of the bell. She’d leap straight from the bed in her haste to answer it before her husband woke. She’d snatch a gown and run downstairs to open the door to the brilliant spotlight of the newly risen sun.

And there, head bowed, the foolish thing would be standing, flanked by stern-eyed swans in policemen’s hats, with truncheons dangling beneath their wings. All the creatures of the lake would be crowded at her gate behind them, whispering and murmuring as they savoured the scandalous scene, helpfully lit up for them, as if in some enormous theatre, by the dazzling sunlight from across the water.

‘Well, isn’t that typical?’ the gander would jeer, pushing to the front in his trilby hat, as the watching animals and birds, depending on their kind, quacked or croaked or honked with disapproval and malicious delight. ‘Isn’t that just typical? They’re oh so high and mighty, they’re oh so la-de-da, but look what they’re really like when you see behind the mask!’